Friday, January 30, 2009

The Banyan tree sounds like quite a charming little location where one could munch on good food and watch a Sunday afternoon pass. Its not.

However the place is anything but good, it was my second visit there and everything is perfectly dissapointing. The menu is a hodge podge with no real theme, they serve breakfast items from eggs to pancakes, sandwiches, pastas and curries.

The Fresh lime soda was pretty good and i ended up having two

The roast tomato soup was horrible. It had a sour bitter taste and was nothing like you would expect, most places when they offer a tomato soup go out of their way to top it up with herbs or garlic or cream to make the taste unique but nothing here.

The pasta salad with pesto sounded excellent in theory. Practically it had nothing going for it, the pesto was tasteless (if you can believe that) the lettuce was fresh probably three days ago.

The Jalapeno poppers haha.. this one was funny, they weren't really jalapenos it was green peppers filled with cheese. what a rip off !

Fresh mushrooms stir fried with peppers on a bed of lettuce. Or more like hot steaming tasteless fire to burn your tongue. Too spicy, the freshness and taste if there was any was lost in the heat...

The Thai Green curry was so full of bamboo shoots and broccoli that one could not chew without having to spit out. The curry itself was average nothing great but not as bad as the rest of the food.

They were supposed to offer pineapple rice which they did not have, so i chose plain rice.

The dessert was Tiramisu and it was actually not too bad. Seems like they accidentally got it right. However it was too warm!

Overall, i have not had such a dreadful meal in a long time. Almost every dish was dissapointing to a large extent, i am all for different tastes and am ready to excuse authencity for fusion. There are amateur cooks who can do a better job surely.

The service was also fairly horrible, completely scatter brained, no training, no finesse no manners. We had to ask for plates each time and for silverware, at one point one of the waiters when asked for the dessert to be brought showed us his palm (wtf is that!) to ask us to wait.

Its nice to see atleast one Blogger who has the right and truthfull reviews. And the best thing about your review's are you neither mince words or sugar quote it. Do not bother about what the lover's of these places or there PR people have to say.

Hey, I've been visiting the banyan tree on and off for about 2 years now, probably making it a total of 5 visits. The last visit was made Sept '09. During that visit the service was good ... it was a lunch visit.

More importantly I wanted to mention that every time I have been there, the food has slowly been getting better and better, as in maybe there was one subpar item, but at the same time, another WOW item. (Either that or I have learned to subconsciously avoid certain things and have been slowly eliminating them from my list of acceptable menu choices).

Anyway I am appealing to you to try it again, and see if you still judge it the same way. PS Their Oreo shake is awesome!!!